


Five Times Claire Bennet Lost Her Virginity

by speccygeekgrrl



Category: Heroes - Fandom
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-10-07
Updated: 2009-10-07
Packaged: 2017-10-02 12:40:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speccygeekgrrl/pseuds/speccygeekgrrl





	Five Times Claire Bennet Lost Her Virginity

**1\. West Rosen**

The first time Claire lets a boy do more than touch through her clothes, she's somewhere around eight hundred feet above the ground. Her skirt is hiked up, her panties fell into the Pacific about five minutes before, and West's hand is sliding over her like the slipstream around them, airy touch and a little cold but thrilling and breath-catchingly new.

"We gotta land," Claire says in his ear, both her arms tight around his neck. "Or I'm going to fall if you keep this up." West laughs, tickles between her legs one more time before holding onto her just as tightly and swooping back toward land.

The best part about West's room is the skylight; it's the perfect way for a flying boy to sneak out-- or sneak his girlfriend in. They land on the bed, and Claire sprawls back with her hair a windblown beautiful mess and her skirt pulled up by one bent knee. "You're gorgeous," West says, and Claire bites her lip and bats her lashes at him, pulling him in by the back of his neck to press her mouth to his ear.

"I want you, West. Now. Please tell me you've got a--" He turns and kisses her silent, kisses her until she rakes both hands up through his hair and sighs a little under him.

"Yeah, yeah I do." Dark eyes meet green, and he's got a wondering, open expression. "I haven't ever--"

"No, me neither." She plays with his hair, a nervous motion she disguises as tender, and he gives her a smile shyer than any she's seen on him before. "But I'm sure. Really sure."

After that, things don't go quite as smooth as their flight. Claire catches a button in her hair while pulling off her shirt; West stretches out to reach a dresser drawer and rolls off the bed instead of just getting up. Teenage eagerness and hormones and their fondness for each other let them laugh off the little hitches, though, until Claire's giggles turn into little huffs of heat against West's throat when his hand finds where it had been before, until West's laugh becomes a low groan when her baby-soft hands curl around him in return.

"Come on," Claire urges, pushing his hand away when he starts to finger her in earnest. "I'm seriously gonna die if you don't--" She bites her lip when he laughs, quiet shivery chuckles stirring her hair.

"Empty threat." Still, he tears the condom packet open and bites his lip as he rolls it on, looking down between them, double-checking against the sex-ed instructional. "Okay. Are you ready?"

"_Damn_ it, West," she starts, and then her mouth falls open as he guides himself into her slow and careful. He pauses when he feels her body resist, and she hitches her hips higher, pushes the heel of her foot against his ass, and makes a shocked sound at the unexpected hurt when she drives herself onto him.

"Claire?" West goes still again, wide-eyed and red-cheeked. "Did I hurt you?" Claire shakes her head-- it was really nothing compared to what she's put herself through in the past year.

"Just didn't expect it. You _can't_ hurt me." She licks her lips, sliding her arms around his shoulders. "Really..." He kisses her sweetly, raising himself up on one elbow and beginning to move. At first, it feels strange, an irregular drag against wet skin, and then West slides his free hand to cup her breast, his thrusts hit a more certain stride, and Claire gasps his name breathlessly.

In absolute terms, it doesn't take long and they don't go anywhere. But for a moment that stretches to infinity, Claire feels like she and West are in a whole new kind of flight.

**2\. Peter Petrelli**

Claire was never good with cost-benefit analysis in her economics class. Still, when she runs across a situation she can't figure out right away, she tries to make the list of pros and cons and see if it helps.

Pro: Peter is her hero. Peter is _hot_. Peter is the kind of guy Claire's dreamed about since she was old enough to think about boys. Peter cares for her more than anyone except maybe her family.

Con: Peter _is_ her family. Peter is almost twice her age. Peter is her uncle, for god's sake. He's her biological father's brother. He's a blood relation.

If only Claire had known that on the night of Homecoming, she might have avoided this whole messy being-desperately-in-love-with (and-lusting-after) her own uncle thing. If she'd grown up a Petrelli, this never would have happened... but she didn't, and here she was, making a list in which the con side is almost entirely the one same thing repeated many ways: giving in to the impulse she felt every time she saw Peter would be incestuous, and that was pretty much the definition of fucked up.

It doesn't seem like Peter is very good at cost-benefit analysis, either, and he's not good at controlling his impulses, because he's the one who starts it: he kisses her, not a family kind of kiss, and how the hell is she supposed to resist that kind of temptation? She's a cheerleader, not a saint.

She has a feeling that this is what those sex ed teachers meant by "putting yourself in a potentially unsafe situation," but Claire knows what it's like to be nearly raped, and if anyone's being pushy now it's her. Maybe she's the one who's unsafe for Peter to be near.

"Claire, stop thinking so much," Peter says, pleads really, his hands clasping her waist and his head bowed as if he's praying. "Tell me to stop."

"Don't stop," she says, and he whimpers at the back of his throat and starts to peel off her clothes, then his own.

When Claire finally straddles his lap and sinks down onto him, the pain is sharp as a pinch and easily ignored as Peter's teeth are inflicting a good kind of hurt on the side of her throat. For a while, she's almost disappointed that she can't bruise, that she won't have the reminder of his hands and his mouth on her skin in the morning. Their bodies heal too fast; the marks that will linger are imprinted in their minds, the mingled passion and shame that will always flood this memory.

Claire can never bring herself to regret it, though. Peter is her uncle, but he's also her first and bravest hero, her first taste of what love really is like.

**3\. The Haitian**

She doesn't remember how small she felt in his arms.

She doesn't remember being consoled, crying against his broad shoulder, mourning the loss of her family, of any chance at a normal life; she'll never recall the way her fists pounded his chest and how he simply absorbed the blows, accepting her fury and her pain and her sorrow. There's nothing left of the skin from which he wiped tears, not a single cell of her that could ever recall curling against him finally, every emotion drained from her except a lingering unnamed fear and a faint veil of gratitude.

She will never remember creeping across the dark motel room, her lithe frame pressing against his side until he woke with a start; never look back on the night she begged to be shown she was still alive, how she kissed him frantically and how he couldn't bring himself to touch her until she pulled his hands against her own body.

The burden of memory is his alone: Noah Bennet's daughter, the girl he'd spent most of his life with the Company protecting, Claire shattered in a way she couldn't simply heal from trying to glue herself back together with his sweat and breath as her epoxy. The agony on her face, his uncertainty to whether it was physical as well as emotional; the way she buried her face against his chest and whispered her plea to forget: that night, the week before, the terror of running, the horror of watching her family torn from her, Sandra's screams and Lyle's sobs and Noah's last words.

He will remember, because he cannot forget.

**4\. Hiro Nakamura**

It's only fair. He saved her life twice, she saved his once, she owes him one. When Hiro shows up at the door of the flat in France where Claire is living while studying abroad, looking hunted and exhausted and nearly despondent, she invites him in without a second thought, sets him down on the couch and brings him a cup of tea and her unswerving attention.

His news isn't good. Almost everyone special they know has been rounded up; he sounds like he's going to cry when he mentions Ando, Daphne, Peter Petrelli, and Claire almost wants to cry too-- who's left to save them all? Hiro only slipped through the cracks because his powers were stolen. She doesn't ask how he found her: he's wearing a pair of glasses that are heartbreakingly familiar, hornrims looking awkward on his round face.

When he's exhausted every bit of news he can remember, he asks if he could have another cup of tea. By the time Claire brings it out from the kitchen, he's asleep, arms folded on the arm of the couch and glasses pressing into his face. Carefully, she slips them from his nose and folds them, rubbing her thumb along the top of the frame; once the tears stop blurring her vision, she tucks a blanket around his shoulders and leaves him in the dark, quiet room, leaving him to his sleeping nightmares while she walks through Paris and can only think on her waking ones.

When she comes home, hours later, her living room has been tidied and her apartment smells wonderful, and Hiro is sitting at the kitchen table eating pancakes. He saved some for her, still warm on the stove, and they taste like waffles more than pancakes, but that's all right with her.

Claire doesn't mind letting Hiro stay. He has no place to go, no place safe-- he can't return to Japan, and he's useless to help in America; Claire knows exactly how he feels. As strange as she thought he was when they first met, now he's a familiar face in an ocean of unfamiliarity. He knows her secret, he knows the truth about what is happening to the world, and he still manages to work up a sincere smile for her when she doesn't even know she needs to see one.

They fall into an easy pattern before he's been there a week. She goes to class, he cooks and keeps the apartment neat, and they do laundry together, clothes tumbling in adjacent dryers as they wait at the laundromat. By the eleventh day, Claire can't bear to leave him on the couch any more; Hiro is a perfect gentleman who sleeps on one side of the bed and never steals the covers, and even his snoring doesn't bother her as much as his presence comforts her.

They wake each other up from nightmares. It's a mutually beneficial arrangement.

She doesn't realize how much time has passed until she wakes up and finds snow covering everything she can see from her window. It's November, and Hiro has been with her since the middle of September; they've been sharing an apartment for fifty-two days, a bed for forty-one, but she can't tell how many days have passed since she fell in love with him. She's halfway certain, from the way Hiro talks about him, that he's in love with Ando; that's okay, it's enough for her to be able to snuggle with him while they watch movies, to joke around and make him smile when he's sad, the same as he does for her, to wake up and touch him gently to wake him too.

The last day of classes before the end of term, she comes home and finds the apartment transformed.

There are candles everywhere, tall ones, pillars, tea lights and votives pushing back the winter's early darkness; there are flowers in strategic places, gorgeous orchids and irises, her favorites. She follows her nose through the florals, picking out a delicious scent of baking, and finds Hiro pulling a pan of brownies from the oven. She waits until he sets them down before calling his name; he turns and pushes his glasses up his nose and then catches her as she flings her arms around his neck, both of them laughing in delight.

In the middle of the golden-lit garden he's made of the living room, they kiss for the first time. Claire fills her hands with him, soft dark hair, cheeks that go rounder with a smile when she touches them, sliding her hands under his shirt to find a swordsman's muscle under the layer of softness that cloaks his full potential; he touches her more fleetingly, tucking her long hair behind her ears, leaving cherry-blossom kisses scattered on her cheeks while his hands skim her arms, caress her back.

His mouth tastes like brownie mix, but his skin tastes clean when she tests the line of his throat with her tongue. Hiro exhales vowels and exclamations that, while short and pleasured, still sound foreign; Claire never thought that moaning was different in other languages, but begging sounds similar in any tongue. She doesn't need a dictionary to understand the _onegai_ he whispers when she kisses the inside of his bare thigh.

They don't rush. Hiro's careful, takes his time on moving his attention down her body in a way no one has before; she's groaning _please_ before he gets past her breasts, invoking his name like a prayer when he lingers on her stomach, cursing his patience by the time he presses his mouth where she's been wet since they embraced in the kitchen. She's sobbing with pleasure before he lifts his head, looking up at her with a small smile and letting her pull him back onto the couch with her.

Claire's hand is still shaking when she reaches to drag Hiro's abandoned pants closer, patting the pockets until she finds what she was half-hoping, half-expecting; his hand is trembling too when he takes the condom from her. Just before he pushes in, he catches her mouth, kissing her so thoroughly and so tenderly that for the first time she can remember, it doesn't hurt at all.

It doesn't hurt the other three times that night, either.

**5\. Gabriel Gray**

 

When Claire and Gabriel meet, she is nineteen and he is twenty-eight.

They've been, respectively, nineteen and twenty-eight for somewhere in the vicinity of seven decades.

They meet in Ontario, of all places, standing at the monorail station. She sees him first, spiked black hair anachronistic in this age, at least for men; everything about his face is the same, from those terrifying eyebrows to the lush curve of his lower lip, and Claire is shocked by her reaction to him: relief, bone-deep and dizzying attraction, the urge to run over and greet him like her oldest friend. Technically speaking, he is the one person on the earth she's known the longest. When she realizes that his gaze has sharpened and landed on her, equally old-fashioned with her long banner of blonde hair, she smiles and lifts one hand in a tentative wave.

The speed with which he cuts through the crowd is incredible. Before she can speak, he's cupping her chin in one big hand, brown eyes alight. "Claire?"

"Gabriel." His _nom de guerre_ has faded from her mind, the name that once terrified her lost to the years. "Hi. What are you doing here?"

"I live here. I teach." She arches her eyebrows, and he looks slightly embarrassed. "I teach genetics."

"Wow." The monorail pulls up behind them, and there's too much to say for them to part ways, even though this isn't the train Gabriel needs, and Claire's not even certain how to get where she lives on the monorail line yet. "I just moved here a couple of weeks ago. I'm a nurse." It's funny, the things they forget and the things they never will.

They talk of the years that have passed: Gabriel's never-easy relationship with Mohinder, his untimely death, years of Gabriel sinking into depression and then shaking himself into continuing Mohinder's lifelong work; her happy years as Claire Nakamura, the pain of watching Hiro and their children grow old while she could never change, how difficult it had been to do as he asked her and go on with her life, the way that helping save lives was what made her feel worthwhile now, when she was still not at peace with her loss, not only of Hiro but of Ishi and Sandra, Chiyo and Hikaru, not one of her children having inherited their mother's immortality.

"It kind of sucks, huh?" Gabriel says, and all Claire can do is laugh.

He insists on taking her to dinner, and they finally have someone else who understands the long-term perspective on the world: how Nathan Petrelli's early offensive against the specials backfired into revolution, the global realization of superpowered people in every nation-- the oppression in certain nations, and the fact that the Prime Minister of Canada is a special herself; the colony on Mars and how tempted they both had been to join that expedition. Then, more quietly, they talk about the lack of others like themselves, how Claire is the only natural-born immortal since Adam Monroe, as far as either of them has found, and they've both been looking. How Gabriel sometimes wishes he could give her back her ability.

That's when she leans over the table and slaps him in the face. "Don't you dare," she growls, "don't you fucking _dare_ leave me the last one now that I know you're still here," and then she can't help leaning over further to kiss him furiously, pulling at his short hair. Gabriel stares at her, then throws a few bills onto the table, takes her arm, and they're gone from the restaurant.

His apartment is a nice place. Lots of glass and steel-ceramics, but his couch is an antique by modern standards-- beautifully anachronistic to her childhood. "Give me one really good reason not to do it, if I find a way," he challenges her, voice mild and eyes calm, and she holds her breath before she can answer.

"Because I don't want to be lonely forever, and I bet you don't, either." He can't meet her gaze, then, doesn't have the strength to admit that even after all this time, he's more afraid of being alone than of dying. She doesn't have the will to wait for him to agree. When she kisses him again she's not as angry but no less forceful, demanding his complicity in the crime of outliving everyone they've loved, forcing him to serve the sentence along with her.

She wonders when in the last seventy years she's become the one who takes something from him and not the other way around; she's fucked the natural order of things so many times that it seems fitting to be the predator this time. He fumbles, trips, belies the grace she remembers him having, and she understands when he touches her with his hands all wrong: Gabriel probably hasn't touched a woman since he betrayed Elle Bishop. "Stop, let me," she orders, pinning his hands to the bed and feeling him grip the sheets.

"Claire, you shouldn't--" he cuts off, biting his lip hard when she presses her thigh against him and finds proof that he wants her, even if he's trying to deny it. "Really," he says, but he shuts up when she pulls his pants away.

"Gabriel, please." He's caused her the worst of pain in the past, but he's never seen her green eyes so hurt as they are now: panes of glass run through with cracks, ready to shatter at the slightest provocation. "Please," Claire says again, softly, and he aches as much as she does inside, he's just better at hiding it.

"Come here." She stretches out next to him, fragile and unbreakable, and when he kisses her he's accepting and yielding and unbearably gentle. She shimmies out of her pants and curls a leg over him; if he's controlling their kissing then she's taking over what's happening below their arms wrapped around each other.

They both wince when she guides him into her; neither one has their eyes open to see that they share the pain. When he comes it's a function of biology, not desire; she doesn't bother bringing herself off, just burrows deeper into his arms and tries to match her breathing to his as they share the bed in silence.


End file.
